SCENE | Mitch and Murray and Kelli Ogmundson Do No 'Harm'

"Must be all the scissoring!"

Photo credit | Shimon Karmel

Fairview Slopes—Starring the appealing former Animal Control actress Kelli Ogmundson, Mitch and Murray Productions stages the North American premiere of British playwright Phoebe Eclair-Powell's gripping but deeply unsettling one-woman play. Harm is a powerful solo performance that requires the proper stamina and emotional range to truly express our toxic culture of digital discomfort and warped social realities through a single person's experiences.

SPOTLIGHT | Maddy Kelly Live x Just For Laughs x Fox Cabaret

"Consent is not a big part of tickling, historically."

His Parents Never Taught Him

Mount Pleasant—(February 18, 2026) Vancouver's very own Maddy Kelly, the now New York City-transplanted stand-up comedian, came back to town for another reliably sharp stage performance. Her latest set of jokes mostly delighted the familiar hometown crowd inside the Fox Cabaret music venue located at the nexus of Main Street and Kingsway as part of the city's annual eleven-day Just for Laughs Vancouver comedy festival.

SCREEN | Revisiting 'Godspell' – 'You Had to Be There' x WFF 2025

"It was the most joyous show to do."

Whistler Film Festival

New York-based filmmaker Nick Davis revisits the legendary 1972 Toronto company production of the Stephen Schwartz hippie musical Godspell, known for its lasting legacy of featuring some of the biggest names in Canadian comedic talent, in his documentary, You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (in a Canadian Kind of Way).

SCENE | 'West Van Story' Sweeps the Spirit of 'East Van Panto'

"You're just jealous, because I was an early developer."

Dawn Petten, Tresha Thamilchelvan, Izel de Lara & Ivy Charlies / Photo credit | Emily Cooper

Commercial Drive—One of my favourite annual traditions of leftist satirical musical propaganda (complimentary), East Van Panto, is back for another year of shared theatrical joy. Theatre Replacement's latest holiday stage production, presented by The Cultch, returned to the York Theatre for its lucky thirteenth edition of love, laughter, and low-income housing.

REEL | Changing 'Wicked: For Good' – A Grand Musical Finale

"The wand really sells it."

Universal Pictures

Wicked: For Good, the second half of blockbuster director Jon M. Chu's two-part film adaptation of the massive Broadway stage musical sensation, adapted from both author Gregory Maguire's titular book series in parallel to its reinterpretation of L. Frank Baum's original 1900 children's fantasy novel finishes off its cinematic reimagining right where Wicked: Part I left off. For the most part, the Wicked Witch of the West-led sequel lives up to the already lofty expectations of the acclaimed first film as a defiantly fitting yet slavish conclusion.

WEEKENDER | PNE Fair 2025 x Hastings Park x East Van

Hastings–Sunrise—(August 14 and 20, 2025) For its 115th year, the 2025 PNE Fair is still trying to make everyone happy. This past weekend, East Vancouver's annual late summer tradition on the Pacific National Exhibition's festival fairgrounds in Hastings Park opened up once again for two weeks of hot summer fun for the whole family.

SCENE | A Historic Royal Visit – Arts Club Cares for 'Casey and Diana'

"This is like the homosexual version of the Make-A-Wish Foundation!"

Casey House / October 25, 1991

South Granville—Arts Club Theatre Company stages North Vancouver playwright Nick Green's acclaimed, fictionized AIDS crisis dramedy, Casey and Diana, inspired by the late Princess Diana's historic 1991 Toronto visit to Casey House, Canada's first freestanding hospice caring for people (primarily gay men at the time) dying from the HIV/AIDS virus. A real tearjerker of a stage play that premiered at the 2023 Stratford Festival, it's a powerful tale that lives up to the actual impact the event had, destigmatizing the epidemic and humanizing those afflicted.

SCENE | Arts Club Deposits 'Primary Trust' x Granville Island Stage

"I miss wanting to win."

Celia Aloma and Andrew Broderick / Photo credit | Mark Halliday

Granville Island—Arts Club Theatre Company brings celebrated African-American playwright Eboni Booth's 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama-winning off-Broadway stage play Primary Trust to Vancouver for its Canadian premiere. It stars Andrew Broderick as the Mai Tai-sipping Kenneth (a role originated by William Jackson Harper), a thirty-eight-year-old suburban bookstore clerk who embarks on a journey of self-discovery after being laid off.

WEEKENDER | The Downside Live x Just For Laughs x Biltmore Cabaret

"It's about all the weird ways hamsters die."

Photo credit | Andrew Kelly/NYT

Mount Pleasant—(February 17, 2025) On a crisp winter Family Day long weekend ("When's Joy Day?") night out, I gathered, amidst a jovial audience, to witness the energetic New York-based, Italian-Jewish-American stand-up comedian co-host a live edition of his semi-popular The Downside with Gianmarco Soresi podcast alongside fellow Uncle Function sketch group sidekick, Broadway performer Russell Daniels, on stage at the Biltmore Cabaret in the middle of the annual ten-day Just for Laughs Vancouver comedy festival.

SCENE | 'East Van Panto' Takes 'Robin Hood' Back from the Rich

"This is Lululemon Lake now!"

Jason Sakaki / Photo credit | Emily Cooper

Commercial Drive—It's that time of year again. East Van Panto, Theatre Replacement's wackiest annual holiday stage tradition presented by The Cultch, returned to the York Theatre for its twelfth edition, featuring a very merry band of animal misfits (the "Merry-Thems") in a hyper-localized, joyful musical twist on the outlaw folklore of Robin Hood.

REEL | 'Wicked' Defies A Wondrous Musical Fantasy

"I'm the other daughter, Elphaba. I'm beautifully tragic."

Universal Pictures

The first half of Chinese-American director Jon M. Chu's long-awaited, two-part blockbuster big-screen adaptation of the beloved Broadway musical sensation, exploring the events of L. Frank Baum's endearing 1900 children's novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, from the revisionist perspective of the green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West character, finally arrives. For all its glamour, Wicked: Part I dazzles as an exhilarating viewing experience mostly aimed at existing fans of the long-running hit musical.

VIFF 2024 | Cementing 'Pavements' – A Pavement Musical Retrospective

"They're like the slacker Rolling Stones of the '90s."

Vancouver International Film Festival

VIFF 2024—Her Smell writer/director Alex Ross Perry helms the meta rock documentary hybrid of a fake musical biopic, Pavements, about "the most important and influential band" of our time, Pavement. It's a complex but hilariously multifaceted riff on the typical kinds of music vanity projects we usually get, including artist-sanctioned documentaries, jukebox stage musicals, or self-important biographical dramas like Bohemian Rhapsody.

WEEKENDER | Patti Harrison Live x Just For Laughs x Vogue Theatre

"You better start agreeing with me right now!"

I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson

Granville—(February 17, 2024) On Saturday night, I spent over an hour witnessing Ohio-born actress/comedian Patti Harrison perform her truly bizarre but side-splitting My Huge Tits Huge Because They Are Infected Not Fake! show—previously seen at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and New York Comedy Festival—alongside hundreds of other fans seated inside the Vogue Theatre as part of the annual ten-day-long eighth annual Just for Laughs Vancouver live comedy festival.

SCENE | Speaking 'Child-ish' – Adults Talking Like Kids x Pacific Theatre

"Playgrounds would be made entirely of mushrooms!"

Photo credit | Chelsey Stuyt

South Granville—Celebrated Australian-born and raised (now Toronto and Los Angeles-based) queer/trans playwright Sunny Drake undertook his ambitious Child-ish project to painstakingly document the real-life thoughts and feelings of forty-one different Toronto area children (ages 5 to 12). First adapted into a fun four-episode web series, it's now been translated into a feel-good live theatrical meta-adaptation of his findings into a thoroughly amusing stage play presented by Pacific Theatre in its world premiere, starring grown-ups as composite characters drawn from his exhaustive pool of interviewed kids and very much made for adult audiences.

REEL | 'Mean Girls' Makes Fetch Happen Musically

"Honey, I don't know your life."

Paramount Pictures / Broadway Video

From comedian Tina Fey, screenwriter of the 2004 original film and its subsequent 2018 Tony Award-nominated Broadway musical adaptation, comes another film version originally inspired by the non-fiction book Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman. This contemporary, social media-centric Mean Girls feels just as polished and fun as previous incarnations.

SCREEN | Sydney Sweeney Interrogates 'Reality' on HBO

"I knew it was a secret. But I also knew I pledged service to the American people."

HBO Films / Seaview Productions

Playwright Tina Satter adapts her acclaimed off-Broadway stage play Is This A Room, dramatizing the 2017 interrogation of former NSA translator turned whistleblower Reality Winner, for the screen, directly based on the 107-minute FBI audio transcript retold verbatim. Reality is a gripping reenactment of these real-life proceedings concerning the leaking of government intelligence confirming Russian interference in U.S. elections.

WEEKENDER | Adam Pally Live x Just For Laughs x Rio Theatre

"It's nice to step outside into a city and see The Last of Us."

Drake and Adam Pally / Photo credit | Grailed

Commercial Drive—(February 17, 2023) I spent An Intimate Evening with Adam Pally last Friday night alongside a packed house full of initially cautious fans of varying levels of inebriation seated inside the Rio Theatre as part of the returning, ten-day-long seventh annual Just for Laughs Vancouver (formerly JFL NorthWest) live comedy festival.

WANDER | Tobias Wong x 'All We Want is More' x Museum of Vancouver

"Humour is a wonderful vehicle to pass on a truth that might not be so pretty."

Kitsilano—(December 29, 2022) Just under the wire before the end of the year, I finally paid a long overdue trip to the Museum of Vancouver (MOV) to visit their latest featured exhibition, All We Want is More: The Tobias Wong Project, a retrospective collection of the provocative Vancouver-born and raised Canadian designer.

SCENE | A Decade of 'East Van Panto' – Reversing 'The Little Mermaid'

"Human beings are so emotionally manipulative!"

Mark Chavez / Photo credit | Emily Cooper

Commercial Drive—East Van Panto, Theatre Replacement's beloved annual holiday tradition presented by The Cultch returns to the York Theatre to celebrate its tenth anniversary by going under the sea with a reimagined contemporary retelling of the classic mer-tale, The Little Mermaid. Gone is the underwhelming and patriarchal romance about an uncomfortably attractive teen princess literally giving up her voice for some bland random dude she met once—replaced here with a very charming pop musical parody about environmentalism, climate change, and unconventional love.

SCENE | 'Tis the Season for Conflict – Mitch and Murray's 'Snowflake'

"So how racist are you then?"

Aaron Craven / Photo credit | Shimon Karmel

Granville Island—Mitch and Murray Productions, so-named after the company in Glengarry Glen Ross, presents the North American premiere of the acclaimed holiday stage play, Snowflake, written by Olivier Award-winning British playwright Mike Bartlett. A searing yet deeply comic seasonal drama about generational divides, father/daughter conflict, and polarizing opinions, this lively staging is a remarkably entertaining yet emotional performance.